[72] περὶ μαθηματικῶν. The article is omitted; but he must mean the students and not the study. This is curious, because Mathematicus in the Rome of Hippolytus must have meant astrologer and nothing else, and what follows has nothing to do with astrology. Rather is it what was called in the Renaissance Arithmomancy. Cruice refers us to Athanasius Kircher’s Arithmologia on the subject. Cornelius Agrippa, De vanitate et incertitudine Scientiarum, writes of it as “The Pythagorean lot,” and it is described in Gaspar Peucer’s De præcipuis Divinationum generibus, 1604.
[73] ψῆφοι, lit., pebbles, i. e. counters.
[74] στοιχεῖα: letters as the component parts or elements of words.
[75] Reading with the text τινὰς for Cruice’s τινὰ.
[76] In the text the Kappa and Tau are written at full length, the other numbers in the usual Greek notation, a proof that the scribe was here writing from dictation and not copying MS.
[77] ψηφισθὲν.
[78] The name is spelt Πάτροκλος.
[79] So that the “root” may be either 7 or 6 according as you use the “rule of 9” or of 7. A reductio ad absurdum.
[80] ἐὰν ἀπαρτίσῃ, “is even or complete.”
[81] I omit the Rho, which in the Codex precedes the Alpha. Cruice suggests it is put for Π.